Bad Habits

“Your net worth to the world is usually determined by what remains after your bad habits are subtracted from your good ones.”

Benjamin Franklin

I find it good to have a healthy pulse on if, when and where you are getting in your own way. It’s often that our thoughts, decisions and habits are the real culprits behind our missteps.

The tricky part is figuring out which habits we have are good and which habits are holding us back.

Here’s a few prompts to get us started (Note: think objectively, not critically. Being negative and down on ourselves isn’t going to get us anywhere healthy.):

Look at what you and your friends do compared to the lives of the people you admire. (i.g. So and so writes daily. So-and-so is always exercising, and my friends and I are always coach spudding.)

What habits / decisions are you making when you feel terrible versus when you feel great? (i.g. I feel great when I go to bed early and get enough sleep / I feel terrible when I sleep less then 7 hours)

Watch what you say to others (or yourself) after you do a thing. (i.g. ‘I know I should eat late and watch tv all night but….’ ‘I normally wouldn’t buy X, but it was on sale…’ — ‘But’s‘ are a great sign of bad habits and bad mindsets.

Once you figure out what is the bad habit, then it’s a matter of replacing it with a better habit until it sticks. Start by looking at the triggers that tempt you to enable your bad habit mode. For example, if you are eating ice cream daily, maybe its because you keep buying ice cream and having it in the house. But if you stop buying it, replace with something else — like dark chocolate, or fruit — then you are removing yourself from it’s hooks. Sure, you could still go out to an ice cream shop and buy a scoop or twenty, but by putting barriers in front of you and your bad habits, you are less likely to act on them.

We all have shortcomings to overcome. The thing that will separate us from the masses is actually stepping up and doing something about them. Change starts with you.